Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(81)
Joined: 3/6/2022
Posts: 4
Location: Netherlands
As an avid Touhou fan, scoreplayer and score TASer myself, I will have to agree that this TAS is incredibly unoptimized and in my opinion made by someone who doesn't really understand the ins and outs of the game.
For someone who is even just decently familiar with the game this is already obvious in the first five seconds of gameplay where a TAS could easily attain every graze point possible without any resource use (323) when this TAS only gets 75. Graze is basically the cornerstone of scoring the game; you have to maximize your graze as well as possible. Most of what I can say about the gameplay would be a repeat of what Pearl has already analyzed and more.
The WR holder in this game (ior) who scored 5.25 billion in this game with the use of resources, also has an LNN (No Miss No Bomb) that scores 2.843 billion. And えなめる (Enameru) also has an LNN that scores 2.333 billion, with shottypes that would not even have a huge difference in score potential. That is to say that the TAS being submitted here scores less in the same category type than two existing runs done by real players do (by 243 and 753 million).
https://eientei.boards.net/thread/527/touhou-lnn-lnnn-thread
This would probably be more appropiate to categorize as a Lunatic No Miss No Bomb (or Perfect) TAS without any scoring tags. I don't think it deserves a speedrun tag either, as then the TAS wouldn't be supergrazing Yamame's second nonspell - missing out on damage output.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(81)
Joined: 3/6/2022
Posts: 4
Location: Netherlands
Info Teddy wrote:
Depending on what you're talking about, this might not even require editing the movie in any way. But you would need to be more specific here.
I thought it's best for a forum post to not get into the specific potential issues until I make a submission, but the short of it is that when I play back the recording, there's some stuttering going on which may just be on my end. And then there's one specific frame where the menu bar of the emulator activates and freezes the game until you click the window of the emulator. This was accidentally left in and from my attempts to tinker with the wtf-file I couldn't remove this freeze without either desyncing the TAS or Hourglass failing to read the file at all.
Info Teddy wrote:
Well, .wtf (Windows TAS file) and .ltm (Linux TAS movie) are two completely different file formats. But in theory it should be possible to write a converter between the two (though it will be a bit annoying because Hourglass made the sub-par decision to be a binary file format, whereas libTAS uses plaintext which is better).
Sadly I'm no programmer, so I think for the time being I will just try to prepare a submission and see if it can be processed. It seems the syncing is most of what matters, judging by what others have said so far.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(81)
Joined: 3/6/2022
Posts: 4
Location: Netherlands
Info Teddy wrote:
Have you considered using libTAS + WINE instead? (That is, run Neko Project in libTAS, and libTAS will automatically run it through WINE so it can run on Linux). Hourglass is one of those tools that are 'Accepted but not preferred' due to various reasons. (And yes, libTAS + WINE is not listed as being officially supported, but just like libTAS + Ruffle before the first published Flash movie, if it syncs and can be reproduced reliably then there's no reason to not accept it.)
I did realize that libTAS is a thing during the making of this TAS, but I honestly don't have the faintest idea about how this tool works. I don't have a Linux device either, so I dismissed trying to do anything with it. When I use Hourglass with Neko Project, not once did I run into desyncing issues, so on that end it should be fine. There are a couple of little things that may require some editing to whoever would encode the TAS recording. If there is a problem there, I may wanna try to figure out what I can do with libTAS (provided it's compatible with Hourglass' file format because I'm not redoing the TAS itself).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(81)
Joined: 3/6/2022
Posts: 4
Location: Netherlands
I've had a couple of questions regarding Hourglass TASes that I assume I can post here:
I've just finished a "Score Attack" TAS of Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square that I would like to submit. I've read through the movie rules, but there's a couple of things I haven't been able to confirm.
My TAS uses Hourglass r81 to record and play back inputs from another emulator (Neko Project 21). This is because the game runs on the NEC PC-98 for which (to my knowledge) there's no emulators that support TAS recording tools. Now I don't know how this site treats TAS submissions like this, where you use a TAS program to record another emulator. And for that matter, is this allowed? This site also doesn't seem to have any console section or existing TASes for the PC-98.
Since the game in question runs on a PC-98, the framerate is also somewhat unusual. The game runs at 56.4 frames per second. I'm not sure if this would in any way be problematic for the judging/encoding process.
I do have a couple more technical things about my TAS I want to ask/mention, but I'll save those for when I'm relatively sure this TAS is allowed to be submitted.
I hope someone can shed some light on this for me. The TAS in question does have a video here, for reference:
Link to video